


Advent V

by Tammany



Series: Assorted Advent Stories, Christmas 2014, All-sorts, some connected. [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-03
Updated: 2014-12-03
Packaged: 2018-02-27 23:58:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2711456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And the night before the night before Christmas continues.</p><p>Oh, and if you care? Mary and all the company are going to get to keep the dishy sleepwear Mycroft has provided. Because not getting to keep it would be tragic....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Advent V

Mary woke up in the middle of the night to an otherwise empty bed and the echoing, uneasy memory of a wailing baby…a baby now silent.

“John?” she murmured, her voice creaky with sleep. “Oi, love….”

There was no answer. She sighed and grumbled and punched her pillow and tried to go back to sleep. She failed. The room was too unfamiliar—the very sounds too different from those of their little terraced townhouse in London. She kept her eyes shut tight—and worried, fretfully. Was little Em all right? Where was John?

At last she rose and slipped on the gorgeous dressing gown Mycroft Holmes had supplied. She loved the thing beyond the point of madness. It was so unlike anything in her own life so far. It was straight out of a movie from the forties: heavy, dreamy, supple silk, a light raspberry pink with miles of circle-skirt and a shawl collar in a luminous paler shade of pink. Big pockets. Fine rope sash. Kick-on mule slippers to go with. Coordinating pink jammies in dense, warm flannel barely a shade lighter than the body of the wrap.

It made her feel like Katherine Hepburn in one of the screwball comedies, or like Lauren Bacall in something sexy with Boggart. In short, it was nothing like Mary Watson, or Mary Morstan—or like A.G.R.A, now lost in the past and unmourned by anyone.

She grimaced, and gave herself a bracing mental kick. Moping because even as a top level spy she’d never led a glamorous James Bond life? Ridiculous.

She still loved the wrap. She wondered if she and John would be invited out again, and if Mycroft Holmes might save it for her to wear again.

She kicked on the fluffy, feathery low-heeled mules, and crept down the hall toward the nursery—a room technically “next to” hers, but separated by closets and changing rooms and cupboards on a scale impossible to imagine in the townhouse, where they’d had to give up having a linen cupboard to make room for Baby Em’s supplies.

She frowned, and slid quietly. Someone was there, outside the nursery…and someone else was in the nursery.

She set herself, prepared to fight. She had enemies. Hell, she wasn’t alone in that. Sherlock, John, Mycroft, DI Lestrade—they all had enemies, and enemies targeted your weak points.

She would kill to defend little Em.

She drifted silently, determining whoever was in the hall was tall and male, with his back to her. She knotted her hands, preparing to strike a blow to the back of his neck—hard and fast and debilitating if not deadly. He was bigger than she was… Well, everyone was bigger than she was, after all. She’d learned young to get a good hit in early, because she might never have a chance if she left her best blows till late.

But as she prepared, two things changed. First, the man in the hall turned, hearing her own motion or sensing her presence through trained professional instincts—and she heard the voice from the nursery clearly.

 

_Break forth, oh beauteous heavenly light_

_And usher in the morning._

_Ye shepherds shrink not with affright_

_But heed the angel's warning._

_This child now weak in infancy_

_Our confidence and joy shall be_

_The power of Satan breaking_

_Our peace eternal making._

 

Mycroft Holmes’ voice, that she’d heard humming and singing odd, entirely unexpected snatches of carols ever since she and John and little Em had arrived the evening before. And the man in the hall was DI Lestrade, one finger rising to hush her.

She blinked, and froze, and his face shone with barely contained laughter when he saw her fists locked to deliver her blow. He gestured, and they crept down the hall together.

“She woke up. John’s apparently out on the terrace with Sherlock, getting in some buddies time, and Mycroft didn’t want you to have to wake up, so he went in. Hope you don’t mind—he brought her a sippy cup and a biccie.”

“And now he’s singing hymns to her?”

He smiled, eyes bright in the light from the big bay window at the end of the corridor. “Yeah.”

She shook her head. “He’s…not what I expected.”

“I know….go figure. Even I didn’t know he’d be like this.” He laughed, silent and breathy. “Hell, I don’t think even Sherlock knew. I guess I should have seen it coming—he’s all home and tradition and family, even if he tries to pretend he’s not. But still…”

She nodded. “They’re always a bit different than you think they’re going to be, aren’t they?”

“Holmeses?”

“Well, and the people around them. John…” She smiled, softly. “My John. Such a grumpy, grouchy, conformist sort of fellow from the outside. I could hardly believe he was ‘Sherlock Holmes’ blogger’ when I started working with him. But it’s there, isn’t it? All that wild, crazy, fierce John-ness? Hidden inside?”

Lestrade nodded, his attention down the hall. “He loves the baby,” he said, sadly. “Doesn’t say so.”

“Well—he was old enough to have helped look after Sherlock,” she said. “He changed Em’s diaper for me this morning….well, yesterday morning, now. He was pretty good at it. It stayed on a treat.”

“Thanks for bringing her.”

She snorted. “It’s me should be grateful. Holiday at the stately mansion and all that. Dancing, catering. Weekend in the country. And the British Government himself rocking my baby down the way. What’s not to like?” She floofed her fists in the pockets of her robe, making those crazy-wide, liquid skirts twitch and fly. “I mean—this! It’s like a dream.”

He looked down at her. He wasn’t as tall as she’d been thinking in the dark of the hall preparing for a fight—but, still, he was taller than her. Well, again—who wasn’t? He was a handsome man, and a kindly one. His silver hair shone in the starlight from outside. He smiled, and turned, gesturing down and to the side. “Look at ‘em,” he said, voice fond.

She crept closer to his side and looked out the bay window and back along the back line of the mansion. Out on the raised terrace, leaning against the stone rail and looking out over the rolling sward, stood two figures: one tall and sylph-slender, the other shorter, a bit stockier. Mad curls and tawny short-cropped burr caught the light.

She smiled. “But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing.”

He laughed. “Me, I think of them as Peter and his very own Lost Boy.”

“Doesn’t matter. If they hadn’t been born, we’d have had to make them up.”

“We’re lucky,” Lestrade said, softly. “Without them, we’d have been ordinary. Sherlock and Mycroft and John—they’re like the Doctor and his Tardis, for normal folk.”

She snorted. “No. More solid,” she said. “More practical. But, still….” she smiled, then turned and walked firmly down the hall, and as she approached she picked up the top line, like the little choir girl she had once been, who forever sang the descant in the children’s choir of the old Neogothic American church of her childhood, her candle clutched tight in her hand. Mycroft’s voice faltered, then strengthened, and as she came to lean in the doorway of the nursery he looked up, smiling, with her daughter cradled tenderly in his arms. His voice, still soft, anchored her light, sailing harmony.

_Break forth, oh beauteous Heavenly light_

_To herald our salvation_

_He stoops to Earth, the God of Might_

_Our hope and expectation._

_He comes in human flesh to dwell_

_Our God with us, Emmanuel_

_The night of darkness ending,_

_Our fallen race befriending._

 

**Nota Bene:**

It is unclear whether any of the characters of “Sherlock” are, in the most conservative of senses, “believers” in traditional Christianity. That said, I continue to feel that both boys look very likely to have experienced the kind of old fashioned upbringing that exposed children to the liturgy and music and theological doctrines of Anglican tradition—and of the two Holmes Boys, Mycroft strikes me as the one who would love the traditions, even if his “faith” was broken or bent or kinked into odd shapes to get reality as he knows it to fit.

Likewise, while I actually expect Sherlock to mostly like kids, I expect Mycroft with his Mother-Hen protective streak and his beyond-all-sanity affection for Baby Brother to be the one easily seduced by a year-old toddler with John and Mary’s blue eyes.

The music is Bach, and is a traditional Christmas feature of Midnight Masses, and you can find a really nifty one-man a capella multi-tracked version [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x8EQH0g9Zg).


End file.
